Latino Merchants Fear Having No Place in Westchester Village's Retail Makeover

PORT CHESTER, N.Y. - The new big-box mall rises like a beige citadel over this homespun village of mom-and-pop shops and wood-frame houses, a locale distinctive in Westchester County because almost half its residents hail from Latin America.

The mall's national tenants -- including Costco, Bed Bath & Beyond and a 14-screen Loews multiplex -- are a muscular contrast to the unsung enterprises along the rest of Main Street, like the Paleteria Fernandez, an ice cream shop; the Mi Refugio travel and money-transfer agency; and a dozen Peruvian, Brazilian, Colombian and Ecuadorean restaurants.

These small businesses have helped give Port Chester a cosmopolitan flavor that draws suburbanites from elsewhere in Westchester and from Connecticut.

But many Latino shopkeepers are slowly realizing that the throngs at the mall, which was largely completed last year, may prefer national franchise restaurants and outlets. With real estate developers hovering, they wonder how long they can endure in this village of 28,000.

Up Main Street from the mall, a temple of retail known as the Waterfront at Port Chester, Ignacio and Florencio Fernandez are still waiting for Costco shoppers to sample their exotic Mexican milk pops, with watermelon, mango and avocado among the 42 flavors, cloned from the treats their mother still makes in Guadalajara.

While the brothers do get many Latino customers, not many mall customers have dropped in, so seven months after their hole-in-the-wall store opened, they worry that it may not be long for this world.

They have a 10-year lease, but they know leases may not mean much when the village has designated a roughly two-block-wide strip between Main Street and the Byram River for redevelopment. The designation allows the village to use its power of eminent domain to condemn and acquire properties -- including the building that houses the Fernandez brothers' shop -- for the enhancement of downtown.

The mall's developer, G&S Port Chester L.L.C., has the first-refusal right to refashion that strip. Even if their shop is not taken, the brothers can imagine national chains like Applebee's or Gap moving in to capture some of the mall's spinoff business. "If they have the money, they do whatever they want," said Ignacio Fernandez. "They can buy anything."

Gregg Wasser, a principal of G&S, said he had no firm plans yet to build anything beyond a Walgreens drug store one block north of his mall. Still, he foresees an effort to clean up the threadbare facades along Main Street, and to replace some stores and restaurants with "smaller national tenants."

Port Chester's mayor, Gerald L. Logan, generally echoed those ideas, adding a preference for "high-end housing" along the river. But he denied any effort to force out Latino shopkeepers. "Nobody is looking to take them out," he said. "They add a nice diversity to downtown."

He and the developer both point out that the mall has created dozens of jobs for Port Chester's Latino residents and that stores like Costco and Super Stop & Shop have provided them with cheaper shopping choices.

Still, many shopkeepers are mindful that eminent domain was used to clear away 400 businesses along the southern stretch of Main Street for the Waterfront mall, beginning in 1999, by designating the neighborhood "blighted."

Robinson Plasencia, a Peruvian baker who set up Nino International Bakery on South Main Street 10 years ago, got a lawyer to fight his eviction and eventually received $160,000 for the costs of moving his business. But he said he was given only seven days to move or else receive a smaller payout. He estimates that at his new location, on a forlorn street three blocks west of Main Street, business is off 70 percent.

"My customers don't want to come here," Mr. Plasencia said. "Most of the people come to this street to buy drugs and beer."

At 57, divorced and living alone, he has plans to return to his Peruvian home city, Trujillo. "I can't pay the rent," he said. "I work for free just to keep the business going."

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Michael Rikon, his lawyer, who is also pursuing more than 25 other claims against the village brought by others displaced by the mall, accuses Port Chester's government of effectively turning over its condemnation powers to the developer.

He has contended that tenants, particularly Spanish-speaking ones unfamiliar with United States law, were wrongfully told they were entitled to a maximum of $25,000 for relocation and nothing for the costs of their often expensive store fixtures.

"I've never seen such abuse in any other case I've handled in 37 years," said Mr. Rikon, who helped draft the state's eminent domain law in the 1970's.

Mr. Wasser of G&S denied any abusive practices, saying that "people were treated the same way I would want to be treated." The lawyer for G&S, Mark P. Weingarten, also denied any wrongdoing, noting that Mr. Rikon has "been unsuccessful in convincing anyone in the courts or elsewhere that what was done was done improperly."

Until the 1960's, Port Chester was largely a compact village of blue-collar descendants of European immigrants. Then refugees from Fidel Castro's Cuba sought work in its dying factories, and later immigrants from South America crammed its Victorian houses as boarders so they could work tending lawns in nearby Greenwich, Conn., and Rye, N.Y. The village's proportion of Hispanics soared to 46 percent in 2000 from 16 percent in 1980.

Already, a group of Latino stores half a block from the mall have been either shuttered or told they could remain only on a month-to-month basis. A beauty salon, whose immigrant owner insisted on anonymity because of the delicacy of her dealings with the landlord, said she has heard her entire building is for sale and her lease is not being renewed.

"They say, 'Just pay up a month's rent, and if we know anything we'll let you know,' " she said.

What upsets her is that she spent tens of thousands of dollars buying hair dryers, chairs and mirrors during her three years in the store, and the landlord will not compensate her.

"I don't sleep. I'm very worried," she said.

Richard Cuddy Jr., who manages the Brazilian grill Pantanal -- his fiancée, Tania Azevedo, is Brazilian -- said he preferred to be optimistic and hoped that the mall "will expose different types of people to different cuisines." Nevertheless, Mr. Cuddy, whose father owns the building, worries about the condemnation sword hanging over the heads of Main Street shopkeepers.

"They can come in here and say they want to take, and they have the right to do it," he said. "You get through all the hurdles of getting your systems down, getting your equipment paid off to the point where you can make money, and they take it all away from you."

Other businesspeople are not fretting. Juan Cepeda, who bought Machu Picchu, a Peruvian seafood restaurant that he is renaming Brias Marina Bar and Grill, owns his building, a block from the mall, and it has not been included in the prospective development zone. So someone would have to make him an irresistible offer to induce him to move.

But Ayda Carmona, whose Mi Refugio travel agency is across Main Street from the mall and who was perhaps the first significant Latino presence on Main when it opened 30 years ago, said she has heard rumors that "this block is going to go."

More immediately, she is upset that the mall was designed with its back turned to Main Street, the wall along on that side left mostly blank. Window-like masonry insets on the wall remind her of a boarded-up building in the Bronx. The mall's garbage is taken out from a portal facing her store.

"This is Main Street, the main street of town," she said, her voice laced with exasperation. "Garbage delivery shouldn't be there. It's very strange. It looks like this isn't going to be Main Street anymore."